March2008Meeting

Moose - objects and antlers

Speaker: Ben Hengst

Moose is a cute, fuzzy module (which just happens to share its name with a big smelly creature.)

Er, it is a postmodern object system which allows you to remove much of the hairiness from your object-oriented Perl code. Moose borrows features from Perl 6, CLOS (LISP), Smalltalk, Java, BETA, OCaml, Ruby and more.

Ben will present a brief introduction to Moose, followed by an overview of (and real-world examples from) a database-linked search/results system built on Moose.

• Saddle the Moose (intro)

  • a perl object system
  • meta syntax for object/class declaration
  • simple example
  • not that weird

• Ride the Moose (code in "the real world")

  • Constructors for free
  • BUILD
  • under the hood - the meta() method
  • getters and setters
    • example
    • possible name space collisions
    • 'rw' vs 'ro'
    • timing issues ( lazy => 1 )
  • strict types
    • things die if they are wrong, just like they should (assertion)
  • roles
  • less code to test

• Love the Moose (techniques and practices)

  • composition / modularization / encapsulation
  • layout of logical file structure with roles
    • easier team workflow / merging
  • QA notes